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innovation
innovation
Intelligent moves
As the world’s population grows – from 7.3 billion to an estimated 9 billion
people by 2050 – cities are building up instead of out. For urbanites to move
smartly in these changing urban environments, specialised people flow
planning and innovative technologies are required.
TEXT
EVELIINA LINDERBORG
PHOTO
KONE
E
very day, more than 200, 000 people migrate
to cities. Urban centers from Europe to Asia,
the Middle East and North America are going
vertical. “We’re seeing unprecedented levels
of urbanization; this combined with an aging
population and digitalization is challenging cities with the
task of making urban environments smarter in order to
be easier to live in,” says
Ari Virtanen
who head KONE’s
Access Control and Integrated Solutions Business. “Smart
cities require intelligent design and technologies from city
structures and systems. But at the heart of smart cities are
intelligent buildings,” he says.
For KONE, a key aspect of providing intelligent people
flow solutions is to integrate advanced technology into
different building systems. The driving principles of
elevator and escalator design nowadays are that they
can communicate with KONE’s People Flow Intelligence
portfolio solutions, including destination guidance, access
control and equipment monitoring solutions.
PLANNING SUPPORT
Smart equipment is required for a building to be intelligent
but having excellent elevators, escalators and related
solutions is not enough. Dr. Marja-Liisa Siikonen, an
acclaimed expert on planning for the smooth flow of
people, leads an international network of traffic planning
specialists at KONE, who help customers plan and
implement the best possible People Flow® well before a
building’s blueprints exist.
“More and more people are coming into cities, and
that’s squeezing people into smaller spaces. Residents
are expecting to be able to move smoothly through their
day, and the more people we have in buildings the more
intelligent transportation solutions are needed,” says Dr.
Marja-Liisa Siikonen
, Director, People Flow Planning.
“We help clients select the right type of transportation
devices for their specific needs in the planning stage to
ensure excellent vertical and horizontal People Flow®,” says
Siikonen.
In huge complexes the planning stage can last several
years. In the world’s third-tallest building, the Makkah
Clock Royal Tower Hotel in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, the
building planning stage continued for more than seven
years, and Siikonen’s team provided hundreds of traffic
HOW SMART
ELEVATORS
WORK
night,” Siikonen explains. “Often the people flow solution
is a compromise between building floor layout, project
budget and the traffic flow requirements depending on
building usage while respecting ethnographic differences.”
“For multipurpose buildings KONE’s intelligent control
systems such as the KONE Polaris Destination Control
System (DCS) allow elevators to prioritize service to serve
certain parts of the building at peak times,” says Siikonen.
The DCS allocation algorithm searches for the optimum
routes for the elevators to serve a destination call. The
algorithm is able to identify the best routes for the elevators
within milliseconds. Optimal call allocation decisions
guarantee short passenger waiting and journey times by
using measured stopping times and elevator flight times.
“The benefit of KONE’s advanced DCS is that in addition
to utilizing destination information to boost elevator
handling capacity, it can also learn to recognize traffic
patterns in a building, and, for example, forecast individual
passenger journeys,” says Siikonen.
“When comparing a conventional elevator system to a
DCS, it could be said that the conventional system is like a
bus and DCS is like a dial-a-ride taxi that takes you to your
destination floor in the fastest way without unnecessary
stops at other floors,” says Siikonen. /
“The conventional system
is like a bus and DCS is
like a dial-a-ride taxi that
takes you directly to your
destination floor.”
Learn
daily traffic
Allocate calls to
elevators
Measure people
flow and elevator
parameters
Forecast
traffic patterns
Minimize
passenger
waiting time
analysis revisions for the client. The busy multipurpose
Makkah venue is next door to Masjid al-Haram, the world’s
largest mosque, which can accommodate up to two million
people.
“Visitors normally practice formal prayers five times
a day,” says Siikonen. “The goal of the customer was to
ensure that up to 75,000 people can exit all seven buildings
through the podium in an organized and timely manner
every prayer time.”
This required a thorough study of optimum people
flow solutions, resulting in an extraordinary amount
of equipment: more than 320 units of escalators and
elevators in the podium and the towers. In addition, KONE
implemented special group control software with artificial
intelligence capabilities to learn and track passenger traffic
patterns in order to optimize people flow. The elevators
include large shuttles that can hold 54 passengers each and
take visitors up to the 15th level’s sky lobby.
In these types of projects, innovativeness is needed
to enable smooth traffic flows. According to Siikonen,
sometimes a new solution is developed together with the
client, which is what happened in Frankfurt’s Gallileo Tower,
where the first KONE Destination Control System (DCS) was
installed.
SMART SOLUTIONS
One of the building types that growing urban centres are
increasingly embracing are tall multipurpose buildings that
house a mix of residential and retail with hotel and office
space. A combination of KONE’s people flow planning
solutions and technological innovations have been used
in many recent multipurpose projects around the world
including the Leadenhall Building, the latest iconic addition
to the London skyline.
“In a mixed-use building the majority of hotel guests will
likely be away during the daytime whereas the majority of
office workers will be present during the day and away at
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